Shen Makes an Earnest Attempt at Making a Fursona (Lore Change and Process)

Hey y'all,

As I was preparing to post the fursona publicly, I had a few thoughts on it. First of all, I updated the art with some details:

And I wanna show y'all how I got here too, my process for drawing a somewhat more complicated drawing than I'd do for a comic panel:

I start with a sketch, on a separate layer from the background of course. I change the background into what I anticipate will be the most prevalent color in the drawing. The sketch phase is all fundamentals -- I do a lot of gesture drawing on https://line-of-action.com/ and you can find cool references on https://posemy.art/pose-reference/. There is no crime in using references!! Though this is not a drawing I used one for.

Then I fill in blocks of colors. This starts to give stuff a form that you can really feel. The shading at this stage was made mostly with hue/saturation/luminosity overlay, but I usually just like to start to create the shading lines without worrying about each individual base color I'm shading.

A bit more texture and shading detail appearing now, and I realized I wanted to add another hand, so I sketched it on a separate layer.

The hand exists now, and more details. By this stage the drawing is essentially done, and I'm just tweaking stuff and trying to make shadows a little more believable, because shading is how you indicate form when you're drawing.

And viola!

I also changed up the lore a bit.

Now he doesn't live in space. He lives in the modern world, and is a haunted house item extraction specialist, with the collar there to kill him if he gets possessed by a dangerous spirit. I like to think raccoons in this world are knowing for being more attuned to the supernatural, kinda like possums in Poppy O'Possum are immune to magic.

And of course the casual fit.

ALRIGHT SIGNING OFF FOR REAL THIS TIME... PROBABLY. SEE YOU IN 2026!!!